January 2017

So you’ve started writing a novel. Maybe you took the plunge after years of dreaming about getting your brilliant idea down in book form. Maybe you participated in November’s NaNoWriMo competition. Maybe you’ve unearthed an incomplete manuscript on your laptop. Whatever the case may be, perhaps the most important (and difficult) part of writing a novel is… finishing it. At this year’s Hal-Con, I attended a panel with the modern master of urban fantasy, author Charles de //

Dean: “They do know we’re brothers, right?” Sam: “Doesn’t seem to matter.” Dean: “Oh, come on… That’s just sick.” In “The Monster at the End of This Book,” the eighteenth episode of the fourth season of Supernatural, brothers Sam and Dean Winchester stumble upon some slashfic featuring their namesake characters in Carver Edlund’s book series: This scene marks one of the show’s first meta references to its fan community and, more specifically, //

There’s a moment when you realize how deeply embedded the Harry Potter series lies within your soul. That moment when your words cannot express how much the fictional wizarding world – its characters, settings, moods – means to you. It is a moment of reverence, of joy, of love. It is, no doubt, sacred. What if we read the books we love as if they were sacred texts? This is the question Vanessa Zoltan and Casper ter Kuile attempt to answer in their podcast Harry Potter and the //

Did you have a good fandom year? I sure did. I was fortunate enough to become the Editor of FAN/FIC Magazine, for which I personally wrote 27 articles about craft, culture, and community. I also won NaNoWriMo by writing the third instalment of my Drarry fanfiction (currently unpublished). Finally, I discovered Supernatural and, after watching all eleven seasons, joined the nuttiest (and most kickass) fandom on the Internet. These are all fandom-related things I accomplished this year, some //

About

FAN/FIC is an online magazine for fanfic readers and writers. We publish compelling articles and personal essays about fan culture, practical advice on how to improve your craft, and interviews with people in the community.